What's New?

TALKING about the degeneration of India is a bit like pointing to the neighbourhood garbage bin and carping that it is never cleaned. So what's new? T.N. Seshan, in his latest book on the subject, which he has co-written with journalist Sanjoy Hazarika, falls into that trap and never really gets out of the muck.

His 305-page collection of loosely strung essays (including two appendices and an index) is an attempt to expose the collapse of Indian society, ranging from, as he puts it, "education to energy, security to culture, health to the status of women, agriculture and industry, environment and the ecnorny". Most people would have had the humility to admit that the task was beyond them and confined themselves to analysing some aspects of the decay. Not Seshan, of course. Undaunted by the scope, he hops from one garbage bin to the next like a sanitary inspector and then pronounces his verdict: It's filthy. So what's new?

In doing so, Seshan gives up the option of trying to focus on a few vital areas and use them to draw patterns for the decline. Worse, by the time he is through with his rantings about how rotten the system is, he has no breath or space left to tell us what the ways out of the mess are. Seshan himself has demonstrated that he could single-handedly bring about reform in India's electoral system-something he narrates at some length in the final chapters of his book. Isn't there a lesson in it for all of us? That all is not lost. and that change is possible if someone decides to utilise the authority he is invested with to say: "Grrr!Ibite."

The other problem with Seshan's theme is that in his eyes, India or Indians can do nothing right. And the blame largely falls on venal politicians, black marketeers, unscrupulous industrialists, blundering planners, docile civil servants and biased journalists. Even the few bright spots he mentions are dimmed by the all-encompassing darkness of decay that Seshan believes India has descended into. If things were really as bad or depressing as he makes them out to be, all of us should have committed collective suicide by now.

For Seshan, however, the glass is always half-empty. Never half-full. He fails to celebrate the successes of the nation. That after 48 years of independence, India has grown into a vibrant democracy. That the Mandal agitation, or the rise of Yadav rule in north India, is an example of how the nation is setting right the centuries of discrimination that caused the decay in the first place. That there are numerous people (Seshan included) and institutions that we can and should feel proud of.

Even in his condemnation, Seshan is far from convincing. Many of his conclusions are based on personal experiences, some of them so frivolous that you begin to doubt his objectivity. If it is not his anecdotes, then he quotes Rajni Kothari's Growing Amnesia ad nauseam to prove his point. Or the Statistical Outline of India 1994-95 (Thanks a lot). He also comes up with such trite one-liners as the "fall in probity in public life has led to a situation where the only place we have titans in this country is in the field of wristwatches". By the end of the book, Seshan comes across even more pompous than he really is. So what's new?

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